The Favorite Cat — Nathaniel Currier, c. 1840

Nathaniel Currier printed The Favorite Cat in New York some time around 1840, a decade before the firm became Currier and Ives and started turning out the winter scenes and clipper ships that made it famous. This is a hand-coloured lithograph: the image was printed in black from a stone, then the colour was brushed on by hand, sheet by sheet, usually by women working an assembly line for a few cents apiece. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds this impression, which came to it in 1962.

It is the odd one out in this collection, and deliberately so. Everything else here is a photograph in quiet greys; this is a piece of popular American printmaking with real colour in it, and a cat sitting with considerable self-regard. Hand-colouring gives it a softness that mechanical printing never quite manages, the pigment sitting slightly off the lines in places. It works where a room needs warmth and a bit of humour rather than another study in restraint.

Each piece is printed to order and stretched over a 1.25 inch solid wood frame, with the image continuing around the edges. It arrives ready to hang, no framing required, in three vertical sizes cut close to the proportions of the original sheet. The source file is an open-access reproduction of a lithograph now in the public domain.

• Medium: matte canvas, stretched over a 1.25 inch solid wood frame
• Orientation: vertical
• Sizes: 12×16in, 18×24in, 24×32in
• Finish: full-colour reproduction, matte surface
• Hanging: arrives ready to hang, no frame required
• Artwork: Nathaniel Currier, The Favorite Cat, c. 1840-50, hand-coloured lithograph
• Original held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, bequest of Adele S. Colgate
• Printed to order, shipped from the nearest production partner